Steamboat Rock, a massif of golden sandstone at the junction of the Yampa and Green Rivers, in what is now the Dinosaur National Park, straddling Utah and Colorado. The placid waters of the Green here are in sharp contrast to the terrific rapids both up- and downstream.
In his later memoir, Powell tells of climbing this rock—a fantastic feat even for a skilled climber with both of his arms. He tells of being stuck on a crag near the summit until his colleague George Bradley, a few feet above, did the decent thing and removed his long underwear, dangling it over the ledge and hauling Powell up with it. The story is true—except for a geographic miscue: it actually took place some hundreds of miles downstream, on a cliff somewhat less intimidatingly terrible than Steamboat Rock.
Upstream of Steamboat Rock, the expedition had already encountered some appallingly dangerous waters. The whirlpools and rapids of the Lodore Canyon—named for Robert Southey’s famously dreadful poem about a waterfall in the English Lake District—claimed the No-Name, which carried all of their crucially important altitude-determining barometers.* Lodore and the Whirlpool Canyon below it had been “a chapter of disasters and toils,” where the men learned very swiftly about being teeth-chatteringly cold and half starved, miserable at the loss of some food and the rotting of the rest. But Powell would not allow discouragement, and he urged the party ever onward, down from Echo Park toward the junction with the Colorado and into the true vertical magnificence and grandeur of what we now know as the Grand Canyon.
The junction came up unexpectedly, a full 538 miles into their voyage. They had run cleanly enough through some three hundred or so miles of mostly canyon country. The names they gave the defiles—in order: Desolation, Coal, Gray, Labyrinth, and Stillwater—suggested their mood on the day or their discovery of some locally unique feature (the lignite layers in Coal Canyon, for example, still very much on display). There was an Indian crossing point just after Gray Canyon, and a track leading westward; on the riverbank were some old rafts and other evidence—fire pits, debris—of mountain men and mule trains. Perhaps, the men surmised, some of these even dated back to the Spaniards’ times. But there was also something chilling about the place: they had heard stories of railroad surveyors who had been killed a few miles west of here a dozen years before. The Powell party had shuddered at the realization, and hurried on downstream.
Shortly after the men emerged from the steady sweeping river race of the Stillwater Canyon, the topography changed swiftly. The high cliffs on both sides of the river eased. On the newly visible far horizon to the east, the men could now see mountains tipped with snow—most probably the Uncompahgres, the “hills that make the rivers red.” The river widened, and a calm tide of cold water started suddenly to bleed in from their left.
This was the Grand River. It has now been renamed the Colorado, because hydrologists see it as an extension of the great stream, not a mere tributary (Powell’s map had the Colorado River marked as flowing down only from where the Green and Grand combined). Names aside, the incoming stream is today just as Wes Powell had described it in 1869: cool, fresh, and swift-running.
I swam in it once, slipping into its coffee-colored waters from a boat just north of Moab, Utah, close beside what is now the Arches National Monument. The river ran through endless miles of treeless, grassless iron-red desert: to be immersed in its limpid cool liquid was just the ticket.
The party reached the junction in mid-July. They camped here for a short while, to regain their breath, redraw their maps, sift the weevils from their flour, and contemplate the awful reality that probably no white man had ever been here before. The place was the meeting point for three dark canyons—two of them extending back upstream to the north and the east, and now the third, quite unexplored, heading downstream to the south. It was here that Powell wrote the passage from which this section’s epigraph is drawn. He ended it:
Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges, where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction; and beyond them, the mountains blending into the clouds.
As refreshed as they ever might be they set off on July 21. Once they were around the bends, the stream became fast and furious. The river began to drop through wild successions of rapids that made the horrors of the Lodore and Desolation canyons seem like mere riffles on a millpond. This was serious, terrifying, deadly dangerous river work.
The sheer walls speared straight down to the water. There was no edge, no gradient, no beach, nowhere that would allow for a landing. The white fury of the stream, its roaring amplified and distorted by the echoes, allowed for no thought, no planning, no hope. For miles at a time, the men could rely on nothing but blind faith that strong wood and gravity would make it all right at the end, as their three remaining boats hurtled uncontrollably on their pell-mell way down the river. They called these first white waters Cataract Canyon, and they hated the place.
Briefly matters then improved, and greatly. The cliffs remained, vast and beautiful and colored like a rainbow, but they were not the hard limestones of before; they were made instead of a lower geological horizon, a soft and easily eroded sandstone. The river’s long and lazy curves made wide sandy beaches where the men could rest, repair, and dry their clothes. They called this place the Glen Canyon: it was long—150 miles, at least—and compared with the miseries of the limestone passage, it had been a transit through the purest paradise.
If the Colorado, like so many great rivers, giveth at moments like this, then it most certainly also taketh away at others. A week later and around a bend, the waters began to churn white once again. The deadly hard limestones returned, and there were many more miles of the dire and dangerous ahead. This was the Marble Canyon—picture-postcard beautiful beyond belief, but with a beauty won at great cost. Few have ventured across some of its bigger rapids,* and boaters and rafters still vanish without trace today in the treacherous boils of Marble Canyon, never to be found whole.
Here the men started to grow restless: the trip was taking too long and was bruising, cold, and dangerous. Major Powell, they complained, was interested only in science—in taking observations, in collecting, in writing. He seemed less concerned with getting the team down to calm waters, to safety, and to home.
There were mutinous rumblings, and they were scarcely mitigated when their leader realized—and promptly told his men—that it was going to get worse and take still longer. For with the cliffs fast rising around them and the outflow of a known river named by the old conquistador explorers the Colorado Chiquita bursting in on their left side, it was clear that the main part of the huge cleft, the hitherto untraveled Big Canyon, as it was then vaguely known—lay now directly in front of them. What had gone before were mere hors d’oeuvres. The main dish lay just ahead.
“We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth,” Powell would later write in his diary,
. . . and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders.
We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about more freely this morning; but to me all cheer is somber, and the jests are ghastly.
For now the journey, so deep into the ground, began to fade into all-day darkness. No longer were the rocks the soft, multicolored, and fossil-rich sandstones of Glen Canyon, nor were they even the tough and mirror-smooth marbles of the wilder rapids above. The river had now dug itself so deep, had excavated its way into what we now know is the ever-uplifting country rock, that it was cutting itself down into the rocks of North America’s ancient basement.
It was now angle-grin
ding its way through mile-thick swaths of lavas and tuffs and ignimbrites and basalts and gabbros and andesites—rocks that hold no fossils, but only sharp crystals, rocks that look tough, uncompromising, lifeless, and generally dark-colored, all of them buried from sight by the shade of the mile-high cliffs beside them, which absorb or remove much of the light from the dreary scene. The men were in consequence ever more beset by claustrophobia and were perpetually tired, wet, and cold; and as all of their scientific instruments had long since been battered out of commission, and with the sun and the stars seen only fitfully (for the weather was poor, and it rained more than it is supposed to in what is now Arizona), any pretense that this was still a scientific expedition had been more or less abandoned.
There was a scattering of better moments. A creek that, in gratitude for relief, they later called the Bright Angel, produced for them a beach and clear drinking water. The unremitting granite abated, and there was a cave made of marble where they lit a fire and camped. High on the cliff walls, they once found the abandoned dwellings of the local Havasupai Indians, together with an ancient garden with squash still growing, which they took to supplement their own fast-diminishing supplies.
There is a Philip Larkin poem, “First Sight,” which I have loved since childhood—and which tells of the astonishment that awaits a lamb, newborn in snow, at the unimagined grass that will soon appear in place of the cold’s unremitting whiteness. The line that haunts—and that haunted me when I first went down into the darkness of Powell’s canyon, when I was still a youngster—was that referring to earth’s immeasurable surprise, the unsupposed wonder that awaited the creature in the days ahead.
It must have been the same for Powell and his men.
Here they were, cold and wet and hungry, a mile deep in the black bowels of the earth, the sky above so distant it was speckled with faint stars even at noon. How could they have possibly known that if they had only been able to climb some thousands of feet outward and upward, the blackness would be transmuted magically into gold and orange and purple, their dripping bastions of black lava sculpted into delicate cliffs and pinnacles of sunburned sandstone, endlessly repeating themselves in marvelous chaos, to produce one of the most incredible sights on the surface of the earth?
How could they have guessed—even considering that they had seen something of the nearby scenery, before the canyon swallowed them down—how magnificent the world was for hundreds of square miles above their watery prison? Up on the desert was a true wonder of the world: when Teddy Roosevelt inaugurated it as Grand Canyon National Park in 1908, he declared simply, and brooking no argument, “You cannot improve on it . . . what you can do is keep it for your children, your children’s children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”
None of this—none of earth’s immeasurable surprise—could John Wesley Powell and his men ever fully imagine. And as they passed unknowingly beneath the cliffs of the South Rim, where in just a few years’ time thousands would stand and gaze in awe, matters were exceedingly grim, worsening by the day. They soon ran into granite once again, and the rapids there were even more terrifying—at one time there was just no water to pass safely through, no beach to enable a portage. And when Powell climbed up a cliff to see if there was any escape, he managed to get himself trapped on a ridge, unable to move backward or forward, burdened by his disability. His men climbed up, exasperated, and got him down, but at no little cost to morale and comradely feelings. The incident was no doubt a contributory factor in the sudden decision by three of the men, all of them hired as hunters, to abandon the expedition.
This was “decidedly the darkest day of the trip.” Soon after the men had shot the rapids below, after a night of discussion and imploring, the three men who decided to leave crossed the river to its northern side aboard the weakened and leaky Emma Dean, which all decided should then be abandoned, leaving the remaining party with just two craft.
The three men opted, bravely and generously, not to take any food with them—just two rifles and a shotgun, together with letters to be delivered (including one to Mrs. Powell) and a fob watch to be handed over in Denver to the sister of one of the men remaining. There were handshakes and weeping, and then the three climbed up a gulch and onto the top of the cliff. Their plan was to find one of the Mormon settlements, which they had been told were not more than seventy-five miles distant.
Powell wrote that he could still see the trio, gazing down from their vantage point on the cliff edge, as his two remaining boats with his five remaining men swept farther downriver, down through what they were later to call, understandably, the Separation Rapid. Once through it, Powell ordered his party to stop, to wait and maybe give the trio—whom they could still just see in silhouette on the high cliff horizon—another chance. There is some suggestion that rifles were fired, an invitation for the men to scramble back down. But they did not. And when they finally clambered over the ridge and vanished, they were never to be seen again. They never made the Mormon villages. It is assumed they were slaughtered, possibly a case of mistaken identity for a party of little-liked railroad surveyors, by Indians.
And the savage irony of this particular kismet is that the expedition they had abandoned at Separation Canyon was now just two days—two days!—from its successful completion.
There were more hellish rapids—the one at a place called Lava Falls, six miles below Separation Canyon, was reckoned the worst of the trip (but is now silted up at the head of Lake Mead, the immense inundation caused by the building of Boulder Dam). But once free of that, and when clear of another couple of stretches of extreme turbulence below, one of which very nearly saw the loss of one of the two remaining craft, finally on August 30, the two boats and their six passengers bobbed out into low cliffs, far horizons, and calm waters. They were set free from what Wes Powell had repeatedly called their prison. It was over.
And civilization reared its head once more, this time so much more benign and welcoming than that shudder-filled afternoon when they saw the old rafts and curious mule tracks back at the end of Gray Canyon. Down on the calms of this lower river, they met a white man, English speaking, friendly, welcoming. He was a Mormon named Joseph Asey, traveling together with his two sons and an Indian guide. They had been waiting by the river for weeks, Asey said. They had been instructed by Brigham Young, back up in Salt Lake City, to remain by the river as it left the lower canyons, and look there for wreckage floating by, perhaps even bodies.
Instead they found survivors. They found, alive, kicking, weary, and triumphant, six remarkable men: George Bradley; Jack Sumner; Billy Hawkins; the Scots youth Andrew Hall, who at nineteen was the baby of the expedition; and the veteran soldiers Walter Powell and his brother, the mastermind of the venture, the man the Ute Indians called Kapurats, John Wesley Powell, “Wes,” the thirty-five-year-old son of an impoverished Methodist minister from Shropshire, now an American hero in the making.
With the meeting and the welcome and the weeks of exultation and congratulation, the private trip down the Big Canyon was now over. All was done, and all had succeeded entirely.
Now Major Powell would head back to the East, to safety, comfort, and congratulation. And there he would be asked, but this time officially, by his United States government, to go back to the canyon. This time, though, he would go as the chief component member of an official geological and geographic survey of the entire Rocky Mountain region, one of the Four Great Surveys that would give the final detailed description of the still unknown quarters of the country.
And five years after leaving the waters behind, in 1876, John Wesley Powell first wrote out the name Grand Canyon. He appears to have concluded that Big Canyon simply didn’t do justice to the almighty crevasse he had seen and journeyed through, so he replaced it with a pair of words soon to be on every American’s lips and not much later on the lips of most sentient English-speaking beings on the planet, as one of the great natural wonders of the world
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THE MEN WHO GAVE US YELLOWSTONE
In the summer of 1867, Ferdinand Hayden, widely regarded as the preeminent field geologist of his time, was a restless man with a very full plate. The Civil War had briefly interrupted the fossil-collecting studies by which he had made his name, since he’d felt himself obliged to serve as an army surgeon on the Union side. But now that the fighting was done and Reconstruction was in full swing, he was in demand again by his government—first to survey and explore the prairies and badlands of Nebraska Territory, until it was promoted to statehood and left to its own devices, and then to do the same for the nation’s remaining Western territories: Dakota, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and Washington.
It was a formidable task, one that—to judge from his ventures’ vast archival legacy of maps, charts, reports, and books—Ferdinand Vanderveer Hayden mastered with the greatest acumen. Had this been his career’s culminating achievement, he might have cemented something approaching a lasting reputation before vanishing slowly into the mists of geologic time as one more hammer-wielding wanderer among many. Indeed, his own road to eventual obscurity might have been taken rather faster. He was known as a difficult man—ruthless, impatient, prickly, and combative—and the fact that he died of syphilis at age fifty-nine, a fate then as now rather uncommon within the geological community, left eyebrows raised and reverence diminished. He was a man who amassed more enemies during his career than made good sense.
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers Page 13